In August 1942, uncertainty was a given. The world wondered whether Germany would complete its conquest of Russia as quickly as it had rolled through Europe.

The bomber crews leaving the Elsham Wolds air station in England pondered the odds they knew mounted against them with each mission over the Ruhr Valley.

And in Ottawa, Janet Carey tried not to question whether all her sons, three serving, one in training, would make it home safely.

Flight Sgt. John Joseph Carey, 22, didn’t.

Just after midnight on Aug. 29, a Messerschmitt ME 110 caught Carey’s Halifax bomber at 9,000 feet. Three crew members parachuted from the crippled plane and would spend the rest of the war as German prisoners. Another died when his ‘chute didn’t open.

Carey, the front gunner, was one of three still aboard when the Halifax fell into Laacher See, a lake south of Bonn. One man’s body was found in the water; Carey — broad of shoulder, athletic, invited just a few years earlier to try out for the New York Rangers — and another flyer, Sgt. J.W. Platt, a Brit, were declared missing.

“My father said that my grandmother never believed — could never accept — that he was dead, because they didn’t find the body,” says Carey’s niece, Maureen Pegg, who lives in Perth, west of Ottawa.

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Of more than 17,000 Canadian flyers killed in the Second World War, almost one-third have no known grave. But the apparent tomb of John Joseph — that’s what the family called him — was there for all to see. Great pieces of the four-engined bomber, said to have been on only its seventh mission, lie just metres below the surface of the volcanic lake. In the early years, a tail section stuck out from the water. Karl Schneider, who grew up nearby, remembered playing on the wreckage as a boy.

“We used the plane as a climbing frame,” Schneider told the Rhein Zeitung newspaper in 2008.

The German authorities approached more gingerly. Fearing the craft still held five huge bombs meant for a Nuremberg industrial target, they repeatedly sent down divers to search. The muddy lake bottom resisted their efforts, but in 2008 a team found human remains.

A University of Bonn scientist did genetic tests and compared the results with the DNA of a relative of Platt, Carey’s fellow crew member. The match failed. But in December 2013 investigators connected with Carey’s brother, Kenneth, in Kingston. Tests by Canada’s Department of National Defence and the Bonn university confirmed that the remains were those of the missing Canadian.

Campsites line the shore of Laacher See, a popular nature spot in the heavily populated region. On the south stands a turreted Benedictine abbey, said to have been narrowly missed by the crashing Halifax.

“My son went a couple of years ago,” says Maureen. “He said, ‘Mom, it’s really strange, because it’s a tourist area, it’s a beautiful little lake, and there’s this plane, under the water, with two bodies on it.’ ”

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The Carey brothers came to Ottawa as teenagers from Winnipeg, where they remembered playing hockey with cow chips on the Red River. Their father, Leo, was a lawyer. Their mother, Janet, fretted over her four active sons.

Now all the brothers are gone: Maureen’s father Fred, himself seriously wounded in the fighting in Belgium, her uncles Doug and John Joseph, and Kenneth, the youngest, who died in May. “He lived to learn that the remains were identified,” Maureen says.

She and her cousins hadn’t been born when John Joseph went missing, but they know him from the family stories. And they’re pleased, she says, that others now are also learning about him.

“We’re so thrilled that people are interested because he’s going to get the respect that he deserves,” she explains, “and in some ways he represents all military people whose remains have never been recovered.”

On July 9, John Joseph Carey will be formally laid to rest, not in Canada but in the Rheinberg War Cemetery in Germany, for more than seven decades the final resting place of 3,300 Commonwealth servicemen, many of them fellow aviators. Maureen and her cousins will be there with officials from the Canadian Armed Forces and government.

They look forward to the ceremony, but at the same time they’ll be thinking about another airman’s relatives who still must live with uncertainty.

“Our family really hopes that at some point the remains of Sgt. Platt are identified, and they receive the same closure that we’ve received.”

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